Recipes 41 & 42 #osgcookbook challenge

So this is what life looked like just a few months ago. We had a long, hot, beautiful summer and I had a blast growing my very first vegetable garden! Right as things ripened and were ready to harvest, I picked up Oh She Glows and plowed my way through most of the salad recipes!

Fast forward to January, and things are getting cold in the Northeast! I have a love-hate relationship with winter. On the one hand, I love the pretty snow, snuggling under a blanket with a good book, getting outside for some skiing or hiking. On the other hand though…. it’s freakin’ cold!!!!

Well, as with all things in life, I think it’s best to just make the most of what you have. So rather than pine away for the days when I could dig in my garden under the sun for hours, I will enjoy the many benefits of living in a chilly winter climate, one of which is the pleasure of making and devouring a delicious bowl of soup!

As I mentioned, this summer I had a crazy amount of veggies to contend with, so my hubby and I were eating a lot of salads. But soup is my true love, (maybe it’s a Canadian thing) and I could not believe it when I realized last week that I had not yet made a single of Liddon’s soup recipes! Time to play catch-up! Lat week I made the Red-Lentil and Kale soup from the #osgcookbook and it was fantastic! I will definitely be making it again and again. This week, I decided to try the Indian Lentil-Cauliflower soup.

Cauliflower, red lentils, and sweet potato are the powerhouses in this recipe. I grew up eating a curried cauliflower and apple soup that my German great grandmother concocted many years ago, so any soup with cauliflower in it is very nostalgic for me.

There is also a fair amount of spice in this dish, with a healthy 2 tablespoons of curry powder along with a few other yummy spices. I added some chili flakes because I like things spicy.

Mmm, watching it bubble away made me feel warmer already! I like to cut up my veggies quite small, as I like to have a bit of everything in one bite. Unfortunately, I overcooked the cauliflower and sweet potatoes as a result. The recipe calls for the soup to simmer for 20 minutes, but after 15 my veggies were already mush. Oh well, live and learn! It just goes to show the importance of checking up on your cooking from time to time, because there can be a lot of variance depending on how you chop things, the power of your stove, the quality of your cooking gear, etc.

The soup was still delicious, nonetheless! And beautiful too! The spices had a wonderful warming effect (kind of like a shot of whiskey, but far healthier :P) I personally preferred the On-the-mend Spiced Red Lentil-Kale Soup from last week, but that’s just me. I can’t wait to make the next soup from the cookbook! I’m thinking the African Peanut stew or the Cream of Tomato. Decisions, decisions…

After all that soup making I was hungry for a snack, so I decided to knock off one more recipe that day and whipped up the Classic Green Monster. I am already a big fan of Liddon’s green monsters, and have made a few variations from her website. My favorite is the Tropical Beauty Green Monster. Funnily enough, I had never tried the classic one before yesterday, partly because I wasn’t into adding flax to my smoothie. But I took a deep breath and told myself I’m a grown-up now, so get over this fear of flax! Look, I really did put it in. And guess what, it was delicious! Flax isn’t so scary after all.